


Both Sides Now

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Love Actually (2003)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-12-22
Updated: 2005-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-25 05:43:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1634621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry is not by nature sceptical, but he's having trouble believing his luck. (Harry/Karen)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Both Sides Now

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Flora

 

 

It takes Harry over a month of accruing late fees to convince himself that the stern gazes she gives him from over the glasses balanced low on her nose are something other than condemning. The white noise of the library narrows down to the thump of book spines against the countertop and the sudden deafening rush of blood to his head. The giddiness feels refreshingly adolescent and Harry happily hands over what was to have been his budget for the weekend. Her eyes decidedly avoid his, but her twitch of a smile feels like the biggest achievement of his adult life.

She hands him the receipt and he thanks her by name. She tries for another glare, and fails.

She doesn't wear a tag and he's not the kind to pry; he learned her name through a common acquaintance who'd been more than happy to tell Harry all about her, the English Literature student with an unfortunate penchant for Austen and the Brontes and an overwhelming need for order that she sublimates through her part-time job at the check-out desk of the university library.

His mates jeer and declare her a terrible bore. Harry concedes to cover the fact that he's never been so fascinated.

He finds ways of spending more time in the library than he ever cared to before. He skips classes and lectures, tries to look busy, hopes his scrutiny passes for studiousness. But her ability to focus puts his own to shame, and she doesn't realise he's been staring until a frizzy-haired cohort putting slips in book jackets elbows her and nods towards him. He forgets to look away and she looks surprised at first, then pleased, then mortified when Harry gets up and crosses the room.

*

They are full-grown adults with a modicum of experience and vestiges of the invincibility of youth, yet they do not kiss until the end of their fourth date. They can see their breath on the air as they laugh their way out of his favourite curry spot, bellies full and heads a-swim from the bottle of wine they'd polished off over a few hours of easy conversation.

He feels confident enough in the unlikeness of her fleeing to comment on the pink of her cheeks, which, incidentally, matches that of her shirt and plastic earrings. He realises later that this is a clumsy compliment, and feels he should've also voiced the extent of his fascination with the softness of her hair, teased gently into loose curls around her face, and the exactitude of her hands when they curl into his coat to tug him closer.

It's up to him then, and he presses her to the cold bricks in the blueish pool of light of a street lamp to kiss her proper, hoping like a sixteen year old version of himself that she'll let him take it further that night. She does.

*

She has surprisingly few possessions for a girl, he realises when their common belongings end up stacked together in cardboard boxes in the middle of a small one-bedroom in Pimlico their second year together. There are a few obvious doubles on the bookshelves, a genial battle of the bands by the tape deck, and the conspicuous lack of a number of essentials in the kitchen, but their first months with no one but each other is the nearest thing he can imagine to bliss. This faultless domesticity eventually settles into a perfect kind of contentment, and though he won't admit it, he never tires of watching her do the littler things, from turning the pages of a book (and the way she touches the tips of her fingers to her lips when she reads or listens to music) to putting the kettle on for tea (and knowing which cup he favours and just how much milk he likes) to losing her nightly fight against slumber, there on the pillow next to his.

He knows they're for good when it occurs to him that he can't say who the iron had belonged to in the first place, and which of the two of them had picked the pattern of the new sheets.

*

The same mates who had ruled her unfit for their Prince Harry (who had, in truth, cultivated until then an air of unattainable cool) are today once again doing their best to keep him from her. He states the need for one last pre-marital cigarette and sneaks into the rooms jealously guarded by a bevy of girls in identical lilac dresses, a clutch of females who have yet to warm to him, believing him capable (and likely) of causing heartbreak. It takes further furtive maneuvering for him to breach the lines, but he comes through and finds her alone in front of a tall mirror, white dress on and earphones snug in her ears, sizing herself up with the sort of bravery in her eyes he'd only seen in her once, when she'd been about to reply to his first invitation to dinner.

The angle of the reflection allows him to watch her for a moment without being seen. He can half-hear the song she's listening to, recognizing the melody but unable to name it. Her earphones hangs upside down against her bare throat, worn so, he guesses, so it doesn't upset the careful architecture of her hair, set carefully in place by the nefarious gaggle of bridesmaids he'd managed to avoid.

When she does catch sight of him, it takes a breathless moment for her to smile, but then it comes, bright and real, and holds for two solid decades.

*

Harry is not by nature sceptical, but he's having trouble believing his luck when he finds himself alone in a hospital courtesy waiting room holding a bag of ice to a bump on the back of his head and dumbly awaiting news of his first-born's arrival. Were it not for an inconvenient fear of blood and the ill-timed faintness that had inevitably followed it, he would be in there with her, witnessing everything first-hand. He forgets his acute disappointment, however, when a plump nurse in a unsettling shade of fuchsia comes to take him to the room he'd been dragged from earlier and presents him with a brand-new daughter and a smile on his wife's face he's never quite seen before or since.

She calls him useless but nonetheless hands him the small squirming bundle, which he cradles to his chest clumsily. He feels, just then, a distinct shift in his priorities and a sudden, very palpable rearrangement of his reality.

*

He's awakened, as he always is, by the domino effect started by the alarm clock set to ring at 7:15 every morning. He never hears it but she always does, and it's the dig of her heel into his shin that stirs him awake in time to see her shrug on a once-new dressing gown and slip out noiselessly to go appease the distant din of children wanting their breakfast.

He showers and comes to, in that order, then ventures downstairs in one of the impeccable suits she buys for him. She smells like soap and sleep when he kisses her on the soft skin next to her ear, and he takes in half a deep breath before she shrugs him off with a smirk and presses a hot mug into his hands. She tells him not to get home too late today, which he promises not to since he's got a light day at the office: a meeting in the morning, then a couple of interviews. He's meant to hire a new secretary today.

*

For a numb moment he doesn't remember where he's flying home from, but it ceases to matter when he sees her at arrivals, a face among a thousand others, the only one he could recognize with his eyes closed.

She avoids his eyes when she welcomes him back, which stings, but he also hears the relief hidden under the words, and this makes it feel like a new beginning. Game over, start again. The territory is terrifying but familiar. The silence between them as they drive back home with the children chattering behind them, feels like a slate being wiped clean; a square one they've been to before, lifetimes ago, when he'd worked so hard to make her smile at him from across a quiet room.

 

 

 


End file.
